The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Mentor tops Euclid to break five-game skid
Cardinals’ Ochaya has 28 points, 17 rebounds; Swider makes clutch free throws
A new year, a new outlook — that’s the way the Mentor girls basketball team is approaching 2018.
Teagan Ochaya had 28 points and 17 rebounds, and Allyson Swider made two free throws with 27 seconds remaining, leading the Cardinals to a 59-57 win over visiting Euclid on Jan. 10.
The win snapped a fivegame losing streak in which Mentor was outscored by an average of 26 points per game.
So with the turn of the new year comes optimism.
And probably a big sigh of relief.
“It’s 2018 and we’re 1-1 in 2018,” said interim coach James Hrusovsky, filling in for head coach Steve Thompson, who is recovering from offseason surgery. “We’re gearing up for the tournament. We’re trying to find our rotation and find out who we are as a team before we head to the tournament.”
If Mentor (5-8, 3-4 Greater Cleveland Conference) does go on a run from here on out, it might look back to Jan. 10 as the day things turned around.
That’s the day the Cardinals built a 14-point second half lead, saw Euclid come back to tie it and then found the answers it needed down the stretch.
Answers that evaded the team during its ugly five-game skid.
“We needed this,” said Swider. “Hopefully it gets us back on track a little bit.”
Mentor had a 48-34 lead early in the fourth quarter before Euclid (3-11, 1-6) began to peck away at the lead.
Junior Constance Chaplin led Euclid’s charge back into the game with 13-point fourth-quarter. Her coast-tocoast drive pulled her team within one point, 49-48, with 3:18 left.
A short while later, Delana Harper drained a 3 from the top of the key to knot the game at 53-53 — the first time the game was tied since 0-0.
But Euclid never was able to take the lead. Ochaya hit a bucket off a feed from Gianna Pegoraro to make it 56-54, and then Swider hit two late free throws for a 58-54 lead.
“I got punched in the eye, so my vision was a little off,” said Swider of the collision that sent her to the line. “I stuck to my fundamentals and put them right in.”
Harper hit another 3 to make it 58-57 with 8.6 seconds left. But Euclid’s last possession called for the Panthers to go the length of the court with 3.0 seconds left, and when the ball was tipped on the inbounds play, time ran out on the Panthers.
“I got punched in the eye, so my vision was a little off. I stuck to my fundamentals and put them right in.” — Mentor’s Allyson Swider, on her free throws late in the game
“We know we’re young and are going to make mistakes,” said Euclid coach Lynn Phillips of her team, which returned one starter from last year’s squad. “The mistakes are getting the best of us right now. We just have to play through it. We’ll work on the mistakes and come tournament time, hopefully we’ve got them all out of the way.”
Chaplin finished with 25 points, 11 rebounds and four assists. Harper had 16 points and eight boards, while freshman Alexis Reese had 13 points and nine rebounds.
“It’ll mesh,” said Phillips, whose team travels to Hathaway Brown next week for its next game. “We’re just not quite there yet.”
Ochaya had a monster game with 28 points, 17 rebounds four assists, three steals and two blocks, which was supplemented by Carolyn Wochele’s 13 points.
“We’re young and inexperienced,” said Ochaya. “Only two or three of us have varsity experience. It’s good they look up to me, I take that role and roll with it.”
Hrusovsky said there are still some parts of his team’s game that need refining. But considering the recent five-game losing streak, the win over Euclid was a step in the right direction.
“It’s huge,” he said. “We found a way to win against a good team. We were able to execute at the end and get the win.”